1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a baking system for plasma display panel and a layout method for said system that is used for baking a glass substrate of a plasma display panel.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, progress has been made steadily to put to practical use large screen flat panel displays (hereinafter referred to as “FPDs”) that can be used as wall-mounted televisions or multimedia displays. For such a large screen FPD, a plasma display panel (hereinafter referred to as “PDP”) has been nominated as the most promising candidate, since it has various merits in terms of such a quality that it is of a self-luminescence type and has a wide visual field angle and its displaying quality is high, but also in terms of such a production aspect that its manufacturing process is simple and an increase of size can be easily achieved.
The PDP is produced by forming various components such as electrodes, dielectric constant, and phosphors in order on the surface of each of large-sized glass substrates called front glass and rear glass according to a thick film forming method that repeats processes of printing, drying, and baking a plurality of times, and by finally sealing a pair of the resultant front glass and the resultant rear glass.
Baking of the PDP glass substrates has been performed according to a method wherein, for preventing failure or deterioration of products due to adhesion of foreign matter, baking furnaces 3 are housed within a clean room 1 as shown in FIG. 7, a plural number of PDP glass substrates placed on setters is conveyed into each baking furnace 3 and, while conveying them in one direction using conveying means such as rollers, the PDP glass substrates are subjected to preheating, soaking, and temperature-lowering treatments according to a predetermined temperature curve.
However, inasmuch as a very large space is required for housing the whole body of a plural number of baking furnaces 3 within the clean room 1 as described above, initial cost and running cost of the clean room 1 become enormous. Further, since a maintenance operation of each baking furnace 3 should be performed within the clean room 1, there has been a problem that dust that is generated upon performing the maintenance operation is scattered in the clean room 1 to adversely affect other installations arranged in the clean room 1.